The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  Holland said, “I could have killed Peterson here. At the time. Underground.”

  “True. But not me, too. You knew that. You’re scared of me. You checked my record with the army. The woman in Virginia told me that. Your tag is on my file. So you knew the lawyer and Peterson and Janet Salter were one thing, and you knew I was another thing. They were easy. You waited on the road and put your strobes on and waved him down and the lawyer stopped right there. Why wouldn’t he? He probably knew you. A chief of police from the next county? You’ve probably had breakfast together half a dozen times. And Peterson would follow you anywhere. And Janet Salter was probably thrilled to see you. Until you pulled your gun.”

  Holland said nothing.

  Reacher said, “Three shell cases. Two of them right inside this car, and the third picked up off Janet Salter’s floor. I’m guessing you dumped them in the trash cans right outside the police station. Should I call the old guy on the desk and ask him to take a look?”

  Holland said nothing.

  Reacher said, “I’m guessing the fourth round is chambered right now. My round. Some kind of an old throw-down pistol. Maybe lost property, maybe a cold case. Or maybe the bikers supplied it. Want to empty your pockets and prove me wrong?”

  Holland said nothing.

  Reacher said, “But my round is going to stay right there in the chamber. Because I’m not like the other three. You knew that. You sensed it, maybe, and then you confirmed it with the army. So you were cautious with me. As you should be. I notice things. You’ve been trying to get to me for the last three hours. Dragging me here, dragging me there, always talking to me, always trying to figure out how much I knew, always biding your time, always waiting for your moment. Like right now. Back in the station house, you were debating with yourself. You didn’t want to bring me here, and then you did want to bring me here. Because maybe your moment might just come out here. But it hasn’t, and it didn’t, and it never will. You’re a smart guy and a good shot, Holland, but I’m smarter and better. Believe me. Deep down you’re just a worn out old country mouse. You can’t compete. Like right now. You’re all zipped up and belted in, and I’m not. I could shoot your eyes out before you even got your hand on your gun. It’s been that way for the last three hours. Not because I really knew yet. But because that’s just the way I am.”

  Holland said nothing.

  “But I should have known,” Reacher said. “I should have known thirty-one hours ago. The first time the siren went off. It was staring me in the face. I couldn’t understand how the guy had seen me without me seeing him. And I knew he would have to show up in a car, on the street, from the front. Because of the cold. And he did exactly that. And I saw him. I saw you. A minute after everyone else left, you showed up. Bold as brass, fast and easy, in a car, from the front. You came to kill Janet Salter.”

  “I came to guard her.”

  “I’m afraid not. The riot could have lasted hours. Even days. You said so yourself. But you left your motor running.”

  Holland said nothing.

  Reacher said, “You left your motor running because you planned to be in and out real fast. You figured you could afford to be a little late up at the prison. Like you were tonight, presumably. But I was in the house. You were surprised to see me there. You needed time to think. So you hung around, all conflicted. Mrs. Salter and I thought you were conflicted about two competing duties. But really you were trying to decide whether I had one of Mrs. Salter’s guns in my belt, and if so, whether you could draw faster than me. You concluded that I did, and you couldn’t. So eventually you left. You decided to try again another day. I’m sure Plato was upset about that. He was probably very impatient. But you did the job for him in the end.”

  Holland was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “You know why, right?”

  Reacher said, “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I finally figured it out. I saw the photograph in your office. She looks just like her mother.”

  “Then you understand.”

  “She wasn’t a prisoner. They made a half-assed attempt at hiding her, but she was there out of choice. That was clear. I guess she liked the lifestyle.”

  “Didn’t make her any less vulnerable.”

  “No excuse. There were other ways of dealing with it.”

  Holland said, “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s it? Three dead and you’re sorry?”

  Holland didn’t answer. He just sat still for a moment longer. Then he took his foot off the floor and stamped down on the gas. The car leapt forward. Dry concrete under the wheels, a big V-8, twin exhausts, plenty of torque, heavy-duty suspension, not much squat, a fast rear axle, good for zero to sixty in eight seconds. Reacher was hurled back against the seat. They were thirty yards from the side of the hut. Ninety feet. That was all. The headlights blazed against it. It filled the windshield. It was coming right at them. The engine roared.

  After thirty of the ninety feet Reacher had a Smith & Wesson out of his pocket. After sixty he had its muzzle jammed hard in Holland’s ear. Before they hit he had his left hand hooked over Holland’s seat back, his arm rigid, his shoulder locked. The front end of the car punched straight through the wooden siding. The airbags exploded. The windshield shattered. The front wheels kicked up on the hut floor and the whole car went airborne. The front bumper hit a bed frame and smacked it like a cue ball and drove it into the paraffin stove. The stove tore out from under its pipe connection and clanged away like a barrel and the car fell to earth and plowed on and hit the bed again and smashed it into the next bed across the aisle. The header rail above the windshield hit the unmoored stovepipe and bent it with a shriek and its raw end scraped the length of the car’s roof and then the car was all the way inside the hut, still moving fast, the chains on the back thrashing and grinding across the wooden floor. Reacher kicked Holland in the knee and forced his foot off the gas. The car crushed beds two-deep against the far wall and punched out the other side into the moonlight and landed hard and came to rest nose-down half-in and half-out of the hut in a tangle of bent iron frames and tumbling plywood sheets. Both headlights were out and there was all kinds of grinding and rattling coming from under the hood. There was hissing and wheezing and ticking from stressed components. There was dust and splinters all around and frigid air was pouring in through the shattered front glass like liquid.

  The Smith’s muzzle was still hard in Holland’s ear.

  Reacher was still upright in his seat, still braced easily against the back of Holland’s chair. The passenger airbag had inflated against his squared shoulder, and then it had collapsed again.

  He said, “I told you, Holland, you can’t compete.”

  Holland didn’t answer.

  Reacher said, “You damaged the car. How am I going to get back to town?”

  Holland asked, “What are you going to do with me?”

  Reacher said, “Let’s take a walk. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  I’ll have plenty of time to read, Janet Salter had said, after all this fuss is over.

  You reap what you sow.

  They climbed out of the wrecked car into the cold and the wind and stepped away into the narrow lane that separated the first row of huts from the second. Holland walked ahead and Reacher followed ten feet behind with the old .38 six-shooter held low and easy. It was the one Janet Salter had cradled through so many hours.

  Reacher said, “Tell me about Plato.”

  Holland stopped and turned around and said, “I never met him. It was all on the phone, or through the bikers.”

  “Is he as bad as he sounds?”

  “Worse.”

  “What’s supposed to happen tonight?”

  “Like you figured. He’s going to take the jewelry out and steal back some of the meth.”

  “And you were supposed to help?”

  “I was supposed to be here, yes. I have some equipment for him, and the key to the door.”

&n
bsp; “OK,” Reacher said. Then he raised the .38 and pulled the trigger and shot Holland between the eyes. The gun kicked gently in his hand and the sound was the same as a 158-grain .38 always was outdoors in quiet cold air, a fractured spitting crack that rolled away across the flat land and faded fast, because it had nothing to bounce back from. Holland went down with a loud rustle of heavy nylon and the stiffness of his coat pitched him half-sideways and left him lying on one shoulder with his face turned up to the moon. Thirty-eight hundredths of an inch was mathematically a little larger than nine millimeters, so the third eye in his forehead was a little larger than Janet Salter’s had been, but his face was a little larger too, so overall the effect was proportional.

  Chief Thomas Holland, RIP.

  His body settled and his blood leaked out and his cell phone started ringing in his pocket.

  Chapter 42

  Reacher got to the phone by the third ring. It was in Holland’s parka, in a chest pocket. It was faintly warm. Reacher hit the green button and raised the phone to his ear and said, “Yes?”

  “Holland?” Practically a yell. A bad connection, very loud background noise, a Spanish accent, nasal and not deep.

  A small man.

  Plato.

  Reacher didn’t answer.

  “Holland?”

  Reacher said, “Yes.”

  “We’re fifteen minutes out. We need the landing lights.”

  Then the phone went dead.

  We? How many? Landing lights? What landing lights? Reacher stood still for a second. He had seen no electricity supply out to the runway. No humped glass lenses along its length. It was just a flat slab of concrete. It was possible the Crown Vic’s headlights were supposed to do the job, in which case Plato was shit out of luck, because the Crown Vic’s headlights were both busted. But then, headlights couldn’t stretch two miles. Not even halogen, not even on bright.

  Fifteen minutes.

  Now fourteen and change.

  Reacher put the phone in his own pocket and then checked through the rest of Holland’s pockets. Found the T-shaped key to the stone building’s door, and a scuffed old Glock 17. The throw-down pistol. There were fourteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.

  His round.

  He put the key and the Glock in his pocket and took another Glock out of Holland’s holster. His official piece. It was newer. Fully loaded. He put his gloves back on and bunched Holland’s shirt collar and jacket collar and parka collar all together in his fist and dragged the body to the nearest hut and all the way inside. Left it dumped in the center of the floor. Then he hustled back to the car.

  Thirteen minutes and change.

  The car was canted down at the front, half-in and half-out of the hut. He squeezed along its flank and in through the hole in the shattered wall and stood where the stove had been and opened the trunk.

  All kinds of stuff in there. But three basic categories: normal car stuff where the Ford Motor Company had planned it to be, regular cop gear neatly stowed in plastic trays, and then other things thrown in on top of everything else. In the first category: a spare tire and a scissor jack. In the second category: a fluorescent traffic jacket, four red road flares, three nested traffic cones, a first-aid kit, a green tackle box for small items, two tarps, three rolls of crime-scene tape, a bag of white rags, a lockbox for a handgun. In the third category: a long coil of greasy rope, an engine hoist with pulleys and tripod legs, unopened boxes of big heavy-duty garbage bags.

  Nothing even remotely resembling a landing light.

  Twelve minutes and change.

  He pictured the scene from a pilot’s point of view. An airliner, a Boeing 737, descending, on approach, dim blue-gray moonlit tundra ahead and below. Visible to some degree, but uniform, and featureless. The guy would have GPS navigation, but he would need help from the ground. That was clear. But he wouldn’t be expecting any kind of mainstream FAA-approved bullshit. That was clear, too. Nothing was going to be done by the book.

  What would he need?

  Something improvised, obviously.

  Fire, maybe?

  World War Two bomber pilots landing in East Anglian fog were guided in by long parallel trenches pumped full of gasoline and set ablaze. Small planes landing secret agents in occupied Europe looked for fields with three bonfires arranged in an L-shape.

  Was Holland supposed to have set fires?

  Eleven minutes and change.

  No, not fires.

  Reacher slammed the trunk lid and kicked away debris from behind the car. He squeezed around to the front and hauled away tangled bed frames from under the fenders and dragged splintered plywood off the hood. The engine was still running. It smelled hot and oily and the bearings were knocking loudly. He squeezed back and opened the driver’s door and dumped himself in Holland’s seat and put the transmission in reverse. Hit the gas and the car jerked and sputtered and dragged itself backward the way it had come. In through the hole in the far wall, across the floor, out through the hole in the near wall. It thumped down tail-first and Reacher spun the wheel and jammed the lever into Drive and headed for the northeastern corner of the runway. The top right corner, from the Boeing’s point of view. He braked to a stop and slid out and opened the trunk again and grabbed the four red road flares from the plastic tray. He tossed three into the passenger seat as he passed and spiked the fourth into the concrete. It ignited automatically and burned fiercely. A bright crimson puffball. Visible from a long way on a road, presumably even farther from the air.

  He got back in the car and headed for the opposite corner. The top left. He had no headlights, but the moonlight was enough. Just. A hundred yards. He used the second flare. Then he set off down the length of the two-mile stretch. No fun at all. The windshield glass was gone and the wind was biting. And the car was slow. And getting slower. It felt close to stalling out. It smelled of burning oil. The engine was knocking and vibrating. The temperature gauge in the dash was climbing steadily toward the red.

  Not good.

  Nine minutes and change.

  Two miles should have taken two minutes, but the wounded car took more than four. Reacher used the third flare in the southwestern corner. The bottom left, from the pilot’s point of view. He got back in the car. Backed up, turned the wheel, headed out. The car started juddering uncontrollably. It started losing all its power. The temperature needle jammed hard against its end stop. Steam and black smoke started coming out from under the hood. Thick clouds of it.

  A hundred yards to go. That was all. One more corner.

  The car made fifty yards and died. It just ground to a stop and stayed there, refusing to go on, hissing and inert, right in the middle of the runway’s southern edge. The transmission was gone, or the oil pressure, or the water, or something, or everything.

  Reacher got out and ran the rest of the way.

  He spiked the last flare and stood back.

  The crimson glow in the four distant corners was way brighter than anything else around it. And it came back off the shaped berms of plowed snow twice as bright. Adequate, from the Boeing’s flight deck. Looking forward and down from an oblique angle there would be no doubt about the shape and location of the landing strip. The car was dark and dead right across the middle of the near end, but it was no worse than an airport fence.

  Two minutes and change.

  Job done.

  Except that Reacher was stuck two whole miles from where he needed to be, and it was a cold night for walking. Except that he was pretty sure he wouldn’t need to be walking. He was pretty sure he could get a ride, if he wanted one, before too long. Maybe even before he froze. Which was good. Except that given the state of his current information it was highly likely his ride would get him to the stone building a little after Plato got there. Which was not good. Not good at all. And not even remotely what he had intended.

  Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired.

  He hustled back through the frigid air to the d
ead car, and he leaned on its flank and watched the night sky in the south.

  And waited.

  * * *

  A minute later Reacher saw lights above the horizon. Like stars that weren’t stars. Tiny electric pinpricks that hung and twinkled and grew and danced a little, up and down, side to side. Spotlights in an airplane’s landing gear, for sure, approaching head-on, maybe ten miles out.

  Then he saw lights below the horizon, too. Yellower, weaker, pooled on the ground, less stable, bouncing, moving much slower. Headlights. A road vehicle. Two of them, in fact, one behind the other on the wandering snowbound two-lane, approaching head-on, crawling along, doing maybe thirty, maybe five miles out.

  His ride.

  Close, but not close enough.

  He leaned back in the cold and waited and watched.

  The Boeing got there first. It started out small and silent, and then it got bigger and noisier. It came in low and flat, all broad supportive wings and swirling heat shimmer and deafening jet whine and stabbing beams of light. Its nose was up and its undercarriage was down, the trailing wheels hanging lower than the leading wheels, like talons on a giant bird of prey ready to swoop in and seize the crippled car like an eagle takes a lamb. Reacher ducked and the plane passed right over his head, huge and almost close enough to touch, and the roiled air and shattering noise that trailed behind it threatened to knock him flat. He straightened again and turned and watched over the roof of the car as the plane skimmed and hung and deliberated and floated, a hundred yards, two, three, and then it put down decisively with a loud yelp of rubber and a puff of black smoke and then its nose tipped down and it ran fast and flat and true before the reverse thrusters cut in and slowed it in a bellowing scream.